Rainforest Action Network's Campaign to Discredit Sarawak
9/11/92
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
/** rainfor.genera: 235.0 **/
** Topic: RAN Under Attack Again in Malaysia **
** Written 11:33 pm Sep 11, 1993 by
Asia.Pacific.Sol@f108.n600.z90.pegasus.oz.au in cdp:rainfor.genera
**
Written by Asia Pacific Solidarity - Sarawak in
peg:rainfor.general on 11th Sept 1993.
Note : New Straits Times is at it again in its wild and not
surprising if it's a baseless reporting on Rainforest Action
Network. NST Editorial can be contacted via :
News Straits Times,
31 Jalan Riong,
59100 Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia
Tel : + 60 3 - 282 3131
Fax : + 60 3 - 282 1434
Source : News Staits Times
Date : 11th Sept 1993
Page : 10 (Home News Section)
Dateline : Kushing, Sarawak
Unabridged
Rainforest Action Network's Campaign to Discredit Sarawak
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KUCHING, Fri. - The executive Director of the Rainforest Action
Network (RAN), Randall Hayes, who visited the Mulu National Park
on an organised jungle safari in June, has embaked on a glocal
campaign to discredit Sarrawak.
Among other things, Hayes has alledged abuse of human rights by
claiming loggers are raping Penan women while their men are being
"beaten by loggers or policemen".
Hayes had sent out appeal letters to 35,000 members throughout the
world as well as made a video film on the so-called "genocide of
the Penan people."
In his letter to RAN members dated July 28, he called on them to
write to the Malaysian and Japanese Prime Ministers and American
President Bill Clinton to urge them to "enforce a morratorium on
all logging of customary tibal rainforest land in Sarawak".
Hayes also urged the members to donate a minimum of US$25 (RRM64)
to RAN to support his "Sarawak Cause". He claimed he had visited a
Penan blockade and interviewed the "victims".
Howeverr a check with the tour company which brought Hayes to
Kuching showed that he had not visited any blockades during the
two week tip.
"There is no logging activities along the headhunters trail and
there is no way he could have sneaked off alone", a spokeman from
the company said.
The leader of the tour goup to Mulu, Mr Eric Hansen, an American
who wrote the book 'Strange in the Forest', had called the NST
(News STraits Times) here from San Francisco to complain, saying
that he was upset with Hayes' pamphlet which was "fabrication".
At no time did we visit any area with logging activities or seen
any logging blockades," Hansen said.
The Sarawak Forestry Depatment is working on the theory that Hayes
fabricated the story to make it appear as though he had visited a
Penan blockade at Long Iman and taken film footage of widespread
deforestation.
In fact there is no logging activity at Long Iman and all the
blockades have been dismantled. This was confirmed by Datuk Leo
Chai, Sarawak's Director of Forestry.
Long Iman is the home of a Penan activist Mutang Tuo who had made
a worldwide anti-logging tourr with several others, including
Anderson Mutang Urud and Bruno Manser, to discredit Saawak in late
1990.
Long Iman has been earmaked as the venue of a Penan Service Centre
to be built in the near future. The Sarawak Government will spend
about RM500,000 to prrovide amenities and facilities such as
health clinics, schools and a community hall and an agriculture
station.
Hayes, who first visited Sarawak together with an official goup in
1988, met Prime Minister Datuk Sri D Mahathir Mohamad during the
Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.
Excerpts from his pamphlet to RAN members read : "I just retuned
from the world's oldest rainforest in the Malaysian State of
Sarawak... It's been four years since I was there and I was
stunned by what I saw."
"I walked to the same spot where I had stood years ago beside a
spakling iver, under s green canopy of vines and trees ... now
there were had-baked, bare dirt logging roads. The stream was
clogging with mud. Dust from the riverbank choked my nostrils."
"I heard only the whinning motor of a logging truck, loaded with
trees torn from the heart of the oldest rainforest on the planet.
The Penan tibe has blockaded that same logging road. They told me
how it feels. As a giant tuck rumbles toward the blockade,
belching putrid diesel smoke and smashing into the mud all forest
creaturs that dare cross its path, their stomachs clench with
fear."
"Their women and children stand in silence, armed only with thei
courage. They know they could be thrown in jail cells. They know
they risk of being beaten by loggers or police. They know loggers
have raped Penan women before."
The pamplet continued : "While standing beside the Penan people in
the afternoon heat, I realised how easy it is - for all of us who
work from the sarety of the United States - to lose touch with
what the fight for the rainforest is all about."
"I saw for myself the horrible fate of the tribal members once
their prristine rainforrests home is gone. The prroud people ...
are being heded into slums rife with disease and malnutrition ..
or sterile alien government housing projects."
Hayes also talks about the "noble wok" done by Sarawak's Baram MP
Harrison Ngau who had been "fighting for the Sarawak Rainforests
for overr a decade without a break" and defending the tibal people
and their lands.
He said that RAN had nominated Harrison for the Goldman
Environmental Award (which came with US$60,000) which he won in
1990. Ngau, an opposition member belonging to the Parti Bangsa
Dayak Sarawak - Sarawak Dayak Party (PBDS), became an MP of Baram
in the 1990 parliamentary election. Ironically, Hayes had told the
NST in seperate interviews in San Francisco and Kuching that US
environmental goups did not have the full facts and that he was in
Sarawak on a fact-finding mission.
On May 14, he told the NST that the American environmental groups
had an abysmal record in terms of telling the facts regarding the
logging issue in Sarawak and about the Penans.
Later in Kuching on June 4, apparently refering to the
demonstration by eight Western Environmentalists who chained
themselves to a bage at the Kuala Baram long pond in Miri in early
1990, he said "I'm in Sarawak to ty to chain myself to the truth
and not a timber barge. The truth seems to be that Sarawak needs
economic alterrnatives." -END
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* Origin: Asia Pacific Solidarity - Sarawak (90:600/108)
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